Research Catalogue

"How can illustration approach the non-representable?" The question is linked to ways of commemorating the children who died during the Holocaust and what kind of representations could be appropriate. As part of a workshop drawing process, information is unfolded about children whose existence was previously documented only by the ghetto archives and the deportation lists made by the Nazi-German administration of Litzmannstadt ghetto. The methodology has been developed though workshops. In the final step of part I, the project investigates how the material may be developed to a book/archive.

This exposition contains a database of materials resulting from the artistic research "Phytopoetic Creation: An artistic and ecological intervention", within my doctorate studies in Performance at the Department of Comunication and Art (DeCA) of University of Aveiro (UA), Portugal. As these results were mostly documented through video, audio and photographs, I decided to use this platform as a medium to share these moments that were central to this artistic research, also containing a published article. The form of relationship established between these materials, with mutual connection and sharing of information and resources, was similar to a network that was developed throughout this research, through practical experience and application. This network, here refered as "Plant Wide Web", contributed crucially to the creation of the final artistic product of this research, "Intertwined Paths: an embodied journey of connection with plants" (2024).

This exposition forms part of the research project exploring the often-overlooked sensory and material facets of photographic production, challenging the traditional focus solely on the visual aspect of photographs. The research questions the prevailing view that understanding photography is limited to analysing the final image, suggesting instead that the process of making a photograph—its production in real-world environments such as laboratories, factories, and manufacturing spaces—holds equal aesthetic significance. The aim is twofold: to redirect attention to processes of photographic making, exploring the aesthetic dimension beyond the photograph itself, and to examine how this shift influences the overall understanding of photographic practice. Employing practice-based research across diverse photographic settings, this study uncovers the aesthetic nuances of C-type printing processes, including the tensioning, fogging, and tearing of photosensitive paper. It adopts an event-centric viewpoint, moving beyond the visual to explore multisensory handlings—listening, touching, and feeling—that are integral to photographic production, and acknowledges the contributions of more-than-human agency in photographic making. This approach allows for a multi-modal presentation of findings, combining traditional written analysis with experiential expositions to highlight the importance of non-visual outputs in photographic making.

Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. BA Photography. The research paper serves as a base for understanding the memories on a case of a person with dementia and their connections to the medium of photography. Photography is used as an attempt to retrieve my grandmother’s autobiographical memories which are often hard to retrieve. It is based on the assumption that every memory, no matter how vague, is still accessible by restoring to a proper process, similar to the latent image on the photographic film that becomes visible only after appropriate processing. Based on existing experimental memory research I constructed a method of finding a cue that can trigger specific memories in a conversation. Photographic images from the past were used as a base of the conversation. In most cases, they didn’t directly trigger involuntary memory, but they served as a starting point for a conversation, allowing my grandmother to start actively thinking about a period of her life. Due to dementia, the responses within one conversation were often repeated, yet after some time, the chain reaction of retrieving memories allowed her to remember some specific details. Her understanding of the fragility of memories was constantly present. On multiple occasions, she expressed that an artificial device, such as photography or writing, should be used to preserve them. The research doesn’t give a complete understanding of how memories and their retrieval work in general, but it gives a better understanding of how it can efficiently be done with my grandmother. The process I developed can be applied to other people if properly adjusted to them. I believe that essentially what counts is not what kind of cue we choose, but that we patiently take time to listen and guide conversations with some previous knowledge about their past.

Over the past few years, fires are everywhere. The summer of 2023, the biggest wildfire recorded in Europe torched large swaths of Northern Greece; fire destroyed ecosystems and devastated local communities. This research paper is divided into two parts; the first part is based on fieldwork conducted in the fire-altered landscape in Evros, after spending time in Kirki village, hearing the stories of locals, having conversations with experts, and documenting my experiences living in the post-disaster land. It is a travelogue to a ground considered “ruined”, in a village slowly disappearing. The second part zooms in on Kirki’s cemetery, approaching it as the sole spiritual place for post-disaster relief in an effort to understand its importance for the community as well as the opportunities that arise in this burial ground. My travel was approached with a commitment to flexibility and was shaped by serendipity. In this multilayered condition of Northern Greece, it is an effort to consider the question of what’s left in the post-fire land of Kirki and what emerges in its damaged cemetery.

at the end of the sentence, it rotted gathers written words and photos exploring how language is not purely about communication, but a medium of revealing hierarchy of bodies, as we assign and circulate signs to bodies - none of which are neutral. Moving between auto-theoretical poetry and essays on 104 pages, I write with an I using language to explore language itself from within; appropriating how words are never innocent, when the languages we speak are the ones with political value.